Current Controversies in Philosophy of Film

Katherine Thomson-Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317655626
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This volume advances the contemporary debate on five central issues in the philosophy of film. These issues concern the relation between the art and technology of film, the nature of film realism, how narrative fiction films narrate, how we engage emotionally with films, and whether films can philosophize. Two new essays by leading figures in the field present different views on each issue. The paired essays contain significant points of both agreement and disagreement; new theories and frameworks are proposed at the same time as authors review the current state of debate. Given their combination of richness and clarity, the essays in this volume can effectively engage both students, undergraduate or graduate, and academic researchers.

Part I What Is the Relation between the Art and the Technology of Film?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315764887-1

Chapter 1 Cinematic Art and Technology

BERYS GAUT

DOI: 10.4324/9781315764887-2

Chapter Overview

In this chapter I argue that cinematic art is dependent on cinematic technology, and that the proper appreciation of cinematic artworks is partly dependent on understanding their technological features. In support of the latter claim, I develop the achievement argument, which holds that appreciating a cinematic artwork is in part a matter of appreciating the achievement that it is, which depends in part on understanding the kinds of difficulties that the filmmakers overcame in making it, and that understanding this partly depends on understanding the technology that the film incorporates. I then consider the prospect of a digital dystopia, the view that digital films are, other things equal, lesser achievements than non-digital ones. This seems to follow from the difficulty principle (other things equal, the more difficult an achievement is, the greater it is), together with the observation that it is easier to create certain effects in digital cinema than in non-digital cinema. I argue against the inevitability of a digital dystopia by showing that both what is achieved and the difficulties overcome can be greater in digital than in non-digital cinema.

Cinema, Media, Art, and Technology

Cinema was born as a technology, but rapidly grew into an art. What is the relationship between its artistic features and its technological ones? One kind of relationship concerns the historical influence of technological developments on artistic ones and vice versa. In the history of cinema there have been episodes when technology led art, others when art led technology, and yet other times when there were positive feedback loops in which technological change drove artistic experimentation, which in turn led to greater demands for technological development. There are also more systematic ways in which art and technology in cinema are linked. I will argue for two dependence claims: Cinematic art is dependent on cinematic technology (ontological dependence), and appreciating cinematic artworks is in part dependent on understanding their technological construction (appreciative dependence); I will develop what I call the achievement argument for the latter claim.

To defend these two claims, something needs to be said about the concepts figuring in them. Cinema I will understand as the medium of the moving image: that is, it is the medium that has the capacity to generate apparently moving images (Gaut 2010: 1; 2012: 202). So construed, cinema consists of a wide variety of different media, including traditional celluloid-based film; hand-drawn cinema, such as that developed by Émile Reynaud in the 1880s; shadow plays; television; and digital cinema, including its interactive varieties, of which the most common type is video games. In most of these kinds of cinema the images are only apparently moving because their motion is illusory (they really consist of a series of static frames projected very rapidly). However, in the case of shadow plays, the motion of images is real, so what appears to be real movement is real movement. So in the definition of cinema “apparently” is not identical to “illusory.” The cinematic medium’s capacity to generate apparently moving images is almost invariably realized, but need not be: Derek Jarman’s Blue (1994) is a cinematic work whose visual aspect consists of a constantly blue screen, but what makes it a cinematic work is that it is in a medium that could have produced moving images. Finally, in cinema the moving images must be publicly accessible—that is, ones that many people can simultaneously see. If someone reading a novel visually imagines the events portrayed therein, that does not make novels a cinematic medium, since the mental images formed are private; even if many people read the novel simultaneously and happened to form exactly the same mental images, that would still not show that the novel is a cinematic work, due to the privacy of the images: One person cannot access another’s mental image.¹

A medium I will understand as a set of practices governing the use of a material for communicative purposes (Gaut 2010: 287–290). Cinema is the medium of moving images, but its material varies. It may be physical (as with celluloid-based film) or symbolic (as in the bitmaps used in digital cinema). The material does not uniquely establish the medium_ Celluloid-based film could be used to make films or to make sculptures. The medium is the set of practices that governs the use of these materials: The cinematic medium employs materials including celluloid-based film and bitmaps in order to generate moving images. Media nest—that is, some media are contained within others (Gaut 2010: 290–291). For instance, the medium of cinema contains the specific media of traditional film and digital cinema. Media can also overlap: Digital films belong to both the digital medium and the cinematic medium, in parallel fashion to the way that operas belong to both musical and theatrical media.²

“Art” I will understand as a cluster concept (Gaut 2000). Cluster concepts are ones that lack a definition in terms of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions, but that satisfy criteria—that is, properties possession of which as a matter of conceptual necessity counts toward an object falling under the concept. None of these properties is individually required, but possession of certain subsets of them qualifies something as falling under the relevant concept. An artwork is an artifact that satisfies criteria such as possessing positive aesthetic properties, being expressive, intellectually challenging, formally complex, and coherent, having a capacity to convey complex meanings, exhibiting an individual point of view, being an exercise of creative imagination, being the product of a high degree of skill, belonging to an established artistic form, and being the product of an intention to make a work of art (Gaut 2000: 28). On these criteria there are many cinematic artworks, which include many popular films as well as those that are branded as “art films.”³

Finally, what is technology? As Peter Kroes (1998) notes, there is no consensus on what is meant by the term. But the following account suffices for our purposes: Technology is knowledge of how to make physical artifacts.

Technology is a kind of knowledge. When we talk of the advance of technology during, say, the nineteenth century, or more specifically of the advance of loom technology during that period, we talk of the increase in knowledge about how to make various artifacts, such as looms. We can also use the term to refer to a collection of things, as in “there’s a lot of technology in Steve’s office,” and this is to say that there are a lot of technological artifacts present, artifacts produced by a kind of knowledge. So the construal of technology as a kind of knowledge is the more fundamental usage. Knowledge-how, of which technology is a species, is to be distinguished from knowledge-that. Technology is often confused or identified with applied science, a kind of knowledge-that, but the two are distinct. As George Basalla, a historian of technology, notes, technology is vastly older than science (Basalla 1998: 27). The most ancient technology known to us consists of stone hand axes, the oldest, Oldowan hand axes, dating from about two and a half million years ago; these may have been made by australopiths rather than members of our own genus, Homo (Boyd and Silk 2015: 269). They far predate scientific knowledge; so science-based technology is only one kind of technology, and until the latter part of the nineteenth century most technology was a kind of craft-knowledge. Even cinema grew partly from nonscientific knowledge, such as the development of the Maltese cross gear that draws the filmstrip in stop-start motion through the camera and projector, and the development of the projector out of earlier magic lantern technologies.

The term “artifact” figures in our definition of technology. An artifact is a kind of object made for some purpose. Not all artifacts are physical: Some are abstract, such as laws, constitutions, and some kinds of artworks, as Amie Thomasson (1999) has argued. It is tempting to hold that technology is knowledge about how to make any kind of artifact, including abstract ones. The problem in doing so, however, is that this would, for instance, count writing the U.S. constitution as a technological achievement, since it involves knowledge about making an abstract artifact. It is better to require that technological artifacts are physical: Oldowan hand axes are physical objects, and when one thinks of technological artifacts, one has physical objects in mind. But there seems to be a problem with this proposal: If all technological artifacts are physical objects, it appears to follow that digital cinema, which consists of bitmaps used to generate moving images, is not a kind of technology, for bitmaps are not physical objects but abstract, mathematical structures that specify the colors and locations of a set of pixels (picture elements), and therefore would not count as artifacts if all artifacts are physical objects. However, the difficulty is illusory, for digital cinema is the medium of moving images generated by bitmaps, and the process of moving-image generation requires physical machinery in order to create images from abstract structures. So if we restrict technological artifacts to physical ones, we can still maintain that digital cinema is a kind of technology.

The Asymmetry between Cinematic Art and Technology

Given these understandings of the terms, it follows that not all media are technological ones. Language is a medium, since it employs symbols according to linguistic practices in order to communicate. But language is not a kind of technology, because spoken words are not physical objects, so one does not need to know how to make physical artifacts in order to speak. Further, the novel is not a technological medium, since novels are abstract entities whose instantiation need not be by physical objects (novels can be read out); in contrast, book production is a technological medium, since it involves making physical artifacts and so requires knowledge of how to make them. Music is a medium, but is not in itself a technological medium_ Singing requires no knowledge of physical-artifact production. But instrumental music is a technological medium since it requires knowledge about how to produce musical instruments. Cinema is a technological medium. Without knowledge of how to make physical artifacts, such as cameras and projectors, cinema could not exist. This is true of all kinds of cinema: Even shadow plays require knowledge about how to produce cut-out figures, lighting sources, screens, and so on.

Art forms are different from media. Not all media are art forms: Communication by telephone is a medium, but is not an art form. An art form is the use of a medium for artistic ends (Gaut 2010: 289). I earlier defined a medium as a set of practices governing the use of a material for communicative purposes. Does not that therefore mean that an art form is a use of something that is itself a use? That sounds odd. To clarify, consider an example. Graphite is a material that can be used in various ways—for instance, as a lubricant or to make drawings. What constitutes a graphite pattern as a drawing is not the pattern itself, for a lubricant pattern might be identical to a drawing’s pattern, but rather the fact that the pattern is used in the medium of drawing. Not all drawings are artworks: Most technical drawings and doodles are not. But one can use drawings for artistic purposes—that is, to realize artistic values. When I talk of the use of a medium for artistic ends, I mean the use for artistic ends of the entities (e.g., drawings) that are constituted as such entities by their use in a medium (e.g., of drawing). So the use of a medium for artistic ends is not the use of a use, but the use of the entities constituted by their use in a medium.

Not all art forms are technological: For instance, novels and poems are not technological achievements. These art forms require genre knowledge and various skills, but these are not technological knowledge and skills, since novels and poems are abstract entities. Likewise, purely vocal music is an art form that is not technological. But the cinematic art form is technological, for the same reason as the cinematic medium is technological: It cannot exist without knowledge of how to make physical artifacts. So there is no cinematic art without cinematic technology.

This ontological dependence claim may seem false. Could there not be kinds of cinema that do not rely on physical artifacts for their production? Suppose that there were a kind of creature, the cinematons, who had a natural ability to communicate with each other by projecting publicly observable moving images simply by thinking, employing no technology. There would be cinematic art without technology, and the ontological claim would be false. However, the ontological claim is not meant to apply to all logically possible kinds of cinema. Rather, it concerns cinema as it has been, is, and is likely to be, and it should be understood in this sense. The point of theorizing about cinema is to explain and evaluate actual cinema and cinematic practices, not to construct theories about merely logically possible types of cinema.

This may raise a fresh worry: Perhaps someday humans will produce cinema as the cinematons do, simply by taking thought, because a neural implant will be invented that allows humans to do this. We cannot dismiss this as something that will never occur. However, the imagined neural implant is a piece of technology, so there is no counterexample here to the ontological dependence claim.

So there is no cinematic art without cinematic technology. What of the converse claim_ Is there cinematic technology without cinematic art? Cinema is used for documentaries, news reports, industrial training films, weather forecasts, and so on, which are not artworks. And cinema was a technology before it was an art: Many of the pioneers of cinema, such as the Lumière brothers, and W.K.L. Dickson (working for Thomas Edison), had no interest in the new medium as art, and it took figures such as Georges Méliès to draw out the artistic possibilities of distinctively cinematic techniques (Ezra 2000). So there is cinematic technology without cinematic art.

Hence there is an asymmetry between technology and art in cinema. There is no cinematic art without technology, but there is cinematic technology without art. So there is an ontological dependence of cinematic art on cinematic technology, but no converse dependence.

The Achievement Argument

Distinct from the issue of ontological dependence is a question about appreciative dependence: Is the proper appreciation of cinematic artworks at least partly dependent on understanding their technological features? I am going to argue that this is indeed the case. Before doing so, it is helpful to consider an example. In Breaking Bad, season 3, episode 12, entitled “Half Measures” (2010), Jesse decides to kill the two drug dealers who murdered his girlfriend’s ten-year-old brother. To jangling, discordant music, he walks into the frame, pulling out a gun, his face tense with fear, as the dealers nonchalantly draw their guns. Shown in a series of alternating close-ups, Jesse continues walking toward the dealers, the camera lingering on their unconcerned expressions, and it seems certain, as Jesse draws ever closer to them, that they will kill him. Suddenly, in a single, continuous long shot, a car veers into the scene from the right, its wheels spinning and screaming, and crashes into one dealer, throwing him over the roof of the car, and runs over the other, bucking up as it drags and crushes him; the first dealer, in the same continuing shot, crashes to the ground behind the car. In the subsequent shots the driver, Walt, dashes out of the vehicle, grabs the dealer’s gun, shoots him in the head, and in extreme close-up says to Jesse the single word “run.”

The scene is brutal, terrifying, and shocking. It is pivotal in many ways to the season, marking Jesse’s increasing terror and disorientation, and Walt’s slide into ever-greater brutality. Central to its power is the car hit; its powerful realism partly depends on the fact that it is shown in a single, continuous shot; so the options of cutting away to allow the stunt performers to be removed to safety and other tricks to be performed are all unavailable. How did the filmmakers do this? “Hit and Run,” one of the extras on the DVD, rev...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I What Is the Relation between the Art and the Technology of Film?
• Part II In What Ways Is Film a Realistic Medium?
• Part III How Do Films Work as Narrative Fictions?
• Part IV How Do Films Engage Our Emotions?
• Part V Can Films Philosophize?
• Index